There's Something In These Walls
by SailorJollyRegina
Summary: Beth recovers from her head wound and makes out on her own, unsure of what is next for her. But she's strong and she's made it this far hasn't she? Brickyl Please remember to leave me a review!


There's Something in These Walls

\- _It took a while_

 _for me to know_

 _I am not alone_

– Stellastarr*

" _You're healed. I mean- technically you can do what you did before, almost. You could contribute…but there was a vote," Dr. Edwards guiltily wrung his hands, looking everywhere but at Beth. "They- we want you to go. Beth, you helped – but Shephard and the rest agree that too much has happened. You could be dangerous to us."_

 _He could have gone on, it seems, but her look silences him. When she speaks her words are clear and steady: "I want food. I want a gun. I want you to take me back where you found me and leave me there. You_ oweme _that."_

There's always this sharp stinging ache, like a migraine gone wild when she wakes now. She supposes, laying with her cheek pressed against a yellowed eggshell mattress, that it would never really go away. One of the lasting effects of her injury – it must have been part of what Edwards had meant by _almost_. Beth scrunches her eyes, digging with the heels of her palms an attempt to rid her thoughts of that awful coward, even if he _had_ saved her life.

Beth rolls over on the floor and makeshift bed, the eggshell mattress and a top sheet printed with oversize brown and yellow roses. Before, she might have thought they looked old timey, might have reminded her of home.

All she can think now is that they look just as dead as everything else.

A movement in the corner by the fireplace makes her hold her breath, and she's a rabbit waiting for the _snap-pull_ of the snare, but she refuses to look – the shape is too similar to Maggie and she doesn't want to acknowledge it just now.

It's been a month now since she's settled at Paper House (Beth's pet name for this house where everything is peeling – wallpaper, paint, you name it – and it's always making these _swish-swish_ sounds like pages being flipped through) and there have been too many of these familiars appearing though she never sees them head on – it's always just these incomplete corners of what was once her family. Mostly it's Maggie, but sometimes it's Glenn, Carol, Carl – even her Daddy that one time. But never Rick. Never…Daryl.

They're not real, they can't be. She knows it's the injury. The house is probably just full of possums or raccoons and her fragile little brain is projecting them to her as real people. Beth scoffs at herself. She lives in a house that's steadily falling apart, full of wild animals who she's given the names of her dead family members. Like a child naming their pets after their favorite Saturday morning cartoon characters. _This cat's Tommy, like the Green Ranger!_ Until next week when the Power Ranger's aren't cool anymore and the cat's name changed. Beth wonders if the names of the mismatched fragments of her ghost family will always remain the same or if they'll fade away after a time. A movement and a furrowed brow – _what was their name again?_

Paper House has what she needs. Well, not _everything_ – but there's room enough that she doesn't feel claustrophobic and a little stream that runs beside it in an overgrown ditch. Water, shelter. The basics. There's not much else and it eats away at her a little more every day. Beth was not made to be a solitary creature. But here she is.

She'd found the place around dusk of the same day the officers had dropped her off at the funeral home. They hadn't even told her good luck or be safe or anything before they drove away. It was as if they sensed some feral thing beneath Beth's quiet, gentle nature. Noah had said he had looked weak to them, like he couldn't have put up a fight – that that must have been why they'd taken Beth too. There had been steel in her eyes as they cut at the officers, watching the placement of their hands and the downward twitch of their mouths. Watching for the slightest notion of betrayal. But they'd known better and left her alone – after the gunshot – and for that, Beth was proud. She'd wanted to change and, hey look, she did. Wouldn't Daryl be proud of her?

So when she stumbled across Paper House she knew it was the place to settle. It had reminded her of the funeral home all those weeks ago with its grand pillars and white walls. And the funeral home, good Lord, the funeral home. How she'd dreamt of it back at Grady. Beth had longed for it. Yeah, it wasn't as sturdy as the hospital – where walkers weren't even a thought so far up and away from the streets that teemed with them – but she wasn't alone. Not only that, she'd had the only piece of her family that she'd thought was left in the whole, lonely, empty world. The last woman, the last man. Daryl and his pig's feet and then that damn dog that wasn't. Before that though, was a delicious haziness – a candlelit exploration of…well, what Beth imagined was something very intimate. Hoped it was and believed it was.

She needs to get up. Beth knows that. There's always work to do, to keep herself safe. Even after everything, Beth believes that everyone's got jobs to do – even if she's the only one there to do them. So she does. Peels herself off the floor and stretches arms above her head, feeling quite luxurious as she does so. Beth is thankful that she has the chance to do something so simple as stretch when waking. Out on the road, in the woods, there was never time. You were just up and gone, aching muscles were left to just ache. Then at Grady there were always prying eyes, watching her every step so that she was frightened to move any other way than mechanically. That was until after the gunshot. When she'd come to she'd surprisingly known where she was, what had happened. They might have technically brought her back from an existence of constant wandering, watching for the next human to stumble across her path, clawing for a scrap of flesh – but as far as Beth was concerned, all of Grady could go fuck themselves.

White sunlight filters through the boards that block the windows. Beth does her best to peer through them to the front of the house where she'd strung up her cans. They're still there, but there's a walker who's gone and gotten itself stuck on the wrought-iron fence that guards the front. The fence had fallen to an angle long before she ever settled there, but really it's helped keep the walkers away – kind of like the stakes that guarded the prison gates. When Beth had seen that fence the first time she came upon Paper House, she'd known it would serve as a great defense, even if it only helped a little. It's something Daryl would've said _couldn't hurt_ with a shrug, but proud of her just the same. But it also reminds Beth of the boy who'd fallen on one back when they still lived at the farm, right there at the end. The one who said he was with men who would hurt her. The one Daryl had beat to a bloody pulp and Rick had come so close to executing. Or that's what Maggie had said anyway.

And oh, how Rick and Daryl had kept them safe. Beth sighs at the thought of them both, head against the planks on the window. Wedding ring on the hand that rests on the gun that rests on the hip of one of the men that worked so hard to keep her safe for all that time. Wings stitched on the vest that lay on the shoulders of the other who was her sole companion for those weeks after the prison fell. Where did they _go_? Would she ever see them again? The real them, not some shadowy spectre flitting about in her peripheral. It was in Beth's nature to believe. Believe that they were still out there, that they were okay – maybe that they were even ( _still?_ ) searching for her. Maybe they went back to the hospital to see if she'd made it, and Daryl had gently and lovingly arranged her little limbs in the back of that Jeep because he'd meant to come back for her. Because the herd had rounded the corner so suddenly they hadn't been able to take her with them. She'd known just from the look on his face – unbelieving, but relieved as if finding her had only been a delusion – when he'd seen her in the hallway that he'd looked and looked for her. Had damn near killed himself doing it, too. Rick's lingering kiss to her forehead, relieved to have her back at last, guiding with firm, reverent hands – guiding her back to all of them. Her _family_.

There's a little sob she doesn't bother to stifle as she adjusts her weapons, brushes stray wisps away from her forehead. Everything has to be right, muscle memory reaching for the right weapon, pistol or blade, if and when something goes awry. There is one weapon missing and Beth can't understand why. Her knife. Hadn't she had it when she dressed in her old clothes to leave Grady?

The walker is ( _was?_ ) a woman and it goes down easily – worn down as it is from a night stuck on the fence, swinging arms and gnashing teeth at nothing at all. Beth pulls it free and drags it across the road to lay in the ditch with the others she's taken out until she can figure out what to do with them. Burning them is what she might have done before, but someone could see the smoke – and that's both exciting and terrifying at the same time. Daryl could see the smoke. Rick, Maggie. _Someone_. But maybe the wrong someone and so she leaves them in their temporary resting place for now. Because it _does matter_ and eventually she'll do right by them.

She crosses the road to the opposite ditch where the creek trickles through, humming along the way. "Bang bang, he shot me down…mmm mmm, I hit the ground. Bang bang, hmm hmm hmmm hmmmm…"

Beth still sings, of course. How could she not when such brightness is part of her very being?

The last few brave mosquitos of the season try to drown out her song with their whines in her ear and she swats at them halfheartedly, pushing through the overgrowth to kneel at the water's edge, Mason jar at the ready. She fills it, catches her distorted reflection in the water and then her humming stops mid-note.

It's not like Beth doesn't know that her face looks much different than it did – Grady made sure of that, both before and after _it_ happened. It's the startling fact that here she is alone and her family is gone – was the price of her life the loss of her family? Staring at her reflection Beth feels really and truly _haunted_ – mentally as well as physically. She's a half-ghost and she's so, so close to joining that family of hers that only lives in the fractured places in her brain, threatening her from the corners of her vision. She could close the gap and make them all a family again. She knows how. Had almost done it before. But no. No. The ache in her head has escalated to a steady thrum that beats along to the same quickened rhythm as her heart – and a spinning, spinning like some possessed merry-go-round though her feet are firmly planted on the ground. It's too much and she drops the jar with a splash and a crack, miniscule shards of glass mixing with the only water source she knows of – then suddenly she's staring again at the piece of broken glass on the floor of her bathroom, clutching a bleeding wrist. And then she's beating at the water with the flat of her hand, a _go away_ so close to escaping her lips, when a voice startles her deathly still.

"Bethy don't do that," the voice pleads gently, disappointed.

Beth's too familiar with that voice to be too cautious and peeks out over the lip of the bank to see Maggie standing there, dimples in her forehead and mouth turned down in a sad kind of understanding.

She's not sure her voice will work, but Beth ventures a "Maggie?" in a cracked voice.

There's no acknowledgement other than a lessening of her frown, green eyes pleading.

She looks down in a frenzy to wipe away the blood from her wrist – some kind of embarrassment, like when it happened back at home – but finds it gone. It was never there.

But Maggie?

Beth scrambles out of the ditch, knocking her shins into the soft earth, desperate to find Maggie really standing there. Because she _was_ really there. She heard her speak. Something the spectres have failed to do thus far.

But when Beth tops the bank and drifts into the yard of Paper House there's no Maggie and she's panting again, the world threatening to bottom out beneath her – but then there's a movement again just out of the corner of her eye behind the house. Maggie's just ahead of her, that's all. _Always was_ , Beth thinks with a shadow of a smile as she rounds the edge of the house. It's hide and seek like when they were little kids. Hay in their hair, scrapes on their knees.

Yet again, there's no sign of her sister, just the empty yard and the heavy wooden door leading to root cellar. It was something Beth had known to check out when she'd become the new resident of Paper House. All the old houses here had them. A place to keep apples and potatoes through the winter and home-canned everything imaginable. She'd been right and lucky too – the cellar had been full of canned pickles and green beans and tomatoes. So when she settled down to eat every night she would say a quiet thank you to whoever had left them, always wishing there was someone else to share her meal with. No, not just someone. Her family.

Beth pulls the cellar door open with a flourish and an " _A-ha!_ " ready for Maggie to laugh and reveal herself, to share a long-overdue sisterly embrace, but she's met with nothing – just dust and old vegetables.

The panic is immediate and about to manifest itself in what would surely be a full blown attack, something she might not even recover from – she could fall down and just never get up – but then the hairs on the back of her delicate neck stand up. A presence – but whose?

Muscle memory guides her hand to the waistband of her jeans, grips her pistol and pulls it out in front of her and she's turning, ready to face them. Ready to kill them. Whoever they are. And then?

Who meets her frenzied glare is not Maggie and not a walker. It's a man. He's still clad in his vest. Hands still covered in a multitude of tiny scars. And his hair is longer than she remembers and that puzzles her. The other familiars always looked the same – and they've always looked the way she last remembers them in Grady's ill-lit hallway. He'd had his crossbow raised but now it's slowly falling to the dying grass. He's looking at her like she's not real, like _she's_ the ghost. None of the other spectres have ever done that before. Besides Maggie – or what she thought was Maggie – she's never looked them head-on.

Beth holds his gaze but it drops to her drawn pistol and then she's warring with her own mind. That…attack at the ditch – it had to be the culmination of weeks' worth of headaches, signs that her mended brain would eventually betray her and now here it was. Daryl Dixon is not standing before her right now. This is the ultimate manifestation of her want, to return to the man who had kept her and taught her, laughed with her, yelled at her. Pushed her.

 _Left her._

"Go," she begins faintly. "Get out of here."

He finally moves. Blinks, hurt and confused maybe. Takes a small step forward but halts when she shakes her gun at his face.

"Get out of here! Go AWAY!" she's screaming now, tears streaming down her face. Angry at herself – at how her own body, her own brain, could mislead her. _Why him?_ Beth pulls the hammer back, can't even look at him, can't even hold her eyes open now, because this _hurts_. Hurts more than anything ever has.

With her eyes still tightly screwed shut, she exhales and moves to bring the pistol to her temple. Hears hurried movement around her, behind her.

And then a hand encircles her wrist, another pulling the gun free and tugging her hands firmly, but gently behind her back.

"Easy, girl" a well-known voice says, reassuring and soft. "We've been lookin' everywhere for you."

Beth's eyes flutter open to find Daryl still in front of her with tears of his own staining his downturned face. The hands holding her tightly turn her in place and she's gazing up at another face she hadn't thought to ever see again.

Rick Grimes. Crinkles in the corners of his eyes. Beard flecked with gray.

It's all she can take, and then she's falling and everything is black.


End file.
